You are in a large team are working day and night at reasonable work schedules, and your company keeps you in check. The company's management is satisfactory and all, and you get paid with very high salaries, to the point that you can't find any jobs around the world with similar management skills.

The problem is, you and the rest of the team are working on a project. This project, because of company policy, must be maintained and be supported until you and most of the team are about to retire.This project is used by millions of people around the world, and they are dependent of your project. This project brings happiness and improves living conditions to them, thus it brings many benefits to all.

However, the project brings unhappiness to you. As you work day by day, maintenance and support becomes gudgingly upsetting, even your co-workers are getting restless and maddening. You complain to your boss, and they tried to help you out. They want you healthy, gave you all sorts of full insurances: car, health, life, etc., and receive full retirement pay, because you and your team are the only people on this planet who knows about the project, and have the endurance to work on it more.

The company could train other people to work on this, but it makes newcomers insane, be driven into oblivion, filled with madness, and makes them impossible to be cured. The project is "cursed".

You wanted to quit this job very badly, but you can't find any other jobs with such decent pay. Even if you did leave, your life will then becomes dependent on this company. Your debt will quickly rise because of high tax fees, will crush you, and there's no other quick getaway for you to finish it off.

Wil you go insane and continue with the project? Will you rather die, like the suicidal workers at Foxconn? Or will you go away, be free from everything, and live by nature?

If you could get all the benefits of your job and somehow reduce the negatives, would it be enough to stop you from going crazy? You could dedicate efforts to fixing the development process issues and see what that gets you. There always seems to be ways to make things easier.

I'm in a similar situation; I support online games with new features and fixes after they go live to try to make as much money as possible before the game dies out. Most of these kinds of games stay online until they no longer make enough money to afford the upkeep, which is an unknown amount of time (usually years). We constantly release new stuff, but our development process seems far more stressful than it needs to be. The only thing I can do is analyze the situation and try to come up with ways to make our development process easier so that we don't get burnt out. I'm currently trying to automate as much of the mundane grunt work as possible. Almost all of the development pain is caused by humans and not the software itself.

Also, take more vacations. All work and no play makes Jack a homicidal maniac.

If you're looking for an exit strategy (read: early retirement), different places in the world have MUCH different costs of living. For example, someone living in the San Francisco or Seattle area could buy a house for $500,000 with $5000 a year in taxes, or buy the exact same house in Idaho for $150,000 with $1100 a year in taxes. There are other differences between these locations, obviously (mostly relating to number of jobs available), but if you aren't even looking for another job, it *may* be feasible to save up a ton of money at your current job and then move to a cheap area when you retire so that you can 'coast' on your money for a lot longer.

My answer is not hypothetical; I have been there and done that.
Morgan Stanley pays extremely well, but you work on a Linux machine with no Internet access at your desk all day, and at the end of the day you aren’t making a game or anything cool, you just work on crappy finance programming.
I am looking at condominiums around Tokyo now that cost over $4,000,000, and with the salary from Morgan Stanley I could afford it.

I worked there for…

…a whole day.

Now I can’t afford the condos I want, but the point in life is to be happy, and that is not going to happen working in such a place.
I realized on the very first day that those working conditions were against my grain and I simply got out.
As soon as you realize money is not the most important thing you will start to actually be happy.
You have obviously learned that money does not buy happiness. Being in a workplace you like doing tasks you enjoy makes you happy.

The obvious 4th option is to simply save your money for a while, quit, use your savings to deal with taxes for 1 year, meanwhile working another job that you enjoy.
Taxes are based on the previous year so if your salary goes down the next year’s taxes decrease as well.

Then there is the obvious 5th option, which I took: Move to another country.
There are jobs everywhere in the world, and your first year there will be basically tax-free.
When I first moved to Japan, after about 5 months my lung collapsed and required a major $3,000 surgery. Because I had no income from the previous year I only had to pay $300 of it. Insurance covered the rest.

There are a billion options. In my life, the only day of work I have even done was that day at Morgan Stanley.
I don’t live to work and I simply refuse to do any job that I do not enjoy thoroughly. As a result, my entire life has been nothing but fun and games (save for that one day) and while I can’t afford the condo I want, I am still quite happy.
If you can’t see your way out of this situation, I feel sorry for you.

As far as I'm concerned, the only trap a person can fall into is a financial trap. Your necessary financial obligations compell you to do action XYZ which satisfies those expenses. At the very least, everyone needs to pay for food, a roof over their head, and means to stay warm/cool around the year. If you have a family to support, your financial obligations increase. Personally, I strive to keep my bills as low as possible. I currently pay $100/month to keep my car insured (though my situation is a special case). The lower your obligations, the easier it is for you to save your money and/or move around to different jobs. Look at all your expenses and decide which ones you can cut (and be aggressive).

If you're one of very few people in the world who can run and maintain an important system, and you're very unhappy with the work, then you have a few options:
1) use your unique position and unhappiness as leverage to negotiate a salary which would compel you to suck it up and stick around (everyone has their price, right? Even if its something unrealistic like $2million/hour).
2) Quit.
3) Do nothing.

It's easiest to do nothing (and thus, the path of least resistance). You have much higher bargaining power with option 1 if option 2 is a realistic option. If no amount of money can convince you to stay, then quit.

Since you're a developer with experience in running and maintaining a large code base, you can pretty much work *anywhere* in the world. So, the local economic circumstances are a bit irrelevant.

Interesting that folks keep bringing up "there is plenty of jobs out there" scenario, when not to long ago in THIS thread it was discussed that in reality the jobs market is very bad, and quitting one's job with no backup is not a smart move. It was also discused that "making a living doing what you like doing" was also only posible for only very few folks.

He says the salary is "very high". If he's a highly paid developer, that means he is not just some newbie with no experience and not really at the point of "getting in". So it seems that it's
a) not that hard to save money and quit, then ""survive"" for several months without a job
b) it shouldn't be as hard to find a new job as for the masses
c) not silly to start an own company or just going freelance for the period when he doesn't get a new job